The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

The Standard for Media Library Portability

OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.

OpenMAX AL 1.1 at a glance

The OpenMAX AL 1.1 specification and header files are available in the Khronos Registry

OpenMAX AL 1.0.1 at a glance

OpenMAX AL is a royalty-free, cross platform open standard for
accelerating the capture, and presentation of audio, video, and images
in multimedia applications on embedded and mobile devices. OpenMAX AL
includes the ability to create and control player and recorder objects
and to connect them to configurable inputs and output objects including
content readers/writers, audio inputs and outputs, display windows,
cameras, analog radios, LEDs, and vibra devices.

The OpenMAX AL 1.0.1 specification and header files are available in
the Khronos Registry

Driving Collaboration

OpenMAX is a non-proprietary, royalty-free standard, primarily targeted at middleware developers producing multimedia codecs, games engines and graphics libraries. OpenMAX is widely applicable to all applications where multimedia performance is a critical issue, including smartphones, games consoles, digital televisions and set-top boxes. Through collaboration and support from a growing number of leading stakeholders, the standard will be developed and promoted, with wide industry support and adoption encouraged.

The working group welcomes the input and experience of existing Khronos members, and encourages new members with multimedia knowledge to join and help ensure that the specifications deliver benefits that are relevant to the entire industry. This includes semiconductor manufacturers, independent software vendors, intellectual property vendors, operating system companies and the OEM or product development companies that supply end users.